David Dayen

Incoming (arriving June 1) American Prospect executive editor David Dayen is a contributing writer to Salon.com who also writes for The Intercept, The New Republic, and The Fiscal Times. His first book, Chain of Title, about three ordinary Americans who uncover Wall Street's foreclosure fraud, was released by The New Press on May 17, 2016.

AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, file A segment of a new high-speed rail corridor under construction in Fresno, California screen_shot_2017-07-19_at_4.28.52_pm.png A week after the introduction of the Green New Deal resolution, designed to build an inclusive economy while fighting the climate crisis, the textbook version of such a project has been essentially cancelled. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom used his State of the State Address to declare that there’s “ no path ” currently for a high-speed rail network connecting all of the state’s population centers. Instead of abandoning the project, Newsom has committed to completing the segment connecting Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced, three cities with a population of around one million in a state pushing 40 million. No line would be preferable to running this line, which would create the false impression that high-speed rail cannot work in America. California’s bullet train tragedy is a cautionary tale on numerous levels. It’s about...

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer listens as Senate Budget ranking member Bernie Sanders speaks during the news conference in Washington. C huck Schumer and Bernie Sanders went to the same high school in Brooklyn, but that’s about all they shared in common until an op-ed in Monday’s New York Times . The subject is stock buybacks, the increasingly common procedure whereby public companies use their prodigious cash hordes generated by record profits to purchase their own shares, rather than increase wages or invest in equipment. It’s one way to leak profits out to investors while workers get the shaft. As Schumer and Sanders point out, between 2008 and 2017, over 80 percent of corporate profits have been dedicated to buybacks and dividends, a more direct cash transfer to corporate investors. Buybacks also enrich shareholders by artificially increasing the stock price—if there are fewer shares available for purchase, the value of each increases...

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/via AP Images Comptroller of the Currency Joseph M. Otting testifies during a Senate Banking Committee hearing. W hen Mick Mulvaney became acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November 2017, there was outrage over Trump installing a crony with designs on destroying the agency that defends people from financial ripoffs. The reaction was far more muted when Joseph Otting, former CEO of OneWest Bank and current head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, began moonlighting as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) earlier this month. But the appointment is just as dangerous to the future of everyday Americans, if not more so. After all, it concerns the largest financial asset most of us will ever purchase—our homes. The FHFA oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giants that purchase mortgages and package them into bonds to keep the market for homeownership liquid. Fannie and Freddie came under...

Press Association via AP Images The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition By Jonathan Tepper with Denise Hearn Wiley The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age By Tim Wu Columbia Global Reports This article appears in the Winter 2019 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . J onathan Tepper is not happy. You might call him angry. “People haven’t used the word anger before, but you’re probably correct,” he told me in a phone call. The source of Tepper’s anger is capitalism; not the ideal laid out in textbooks, but how it’s been practiced since the 1980s. In a capitalist system, increased productivity and tight labor markets should lead to higher wages. But in the U.S., wages for the typical worker have been flat for four decades. In a capitalist system, “creative destruction” keeps the economy vibrant, as upstart companies push out less agile ones. But the rate of new business formation has been cut in half since the late 1970s. In a...

John Roark/The Post-Register via AP Shoppers walk by Sears department store with store closing signs at the Grand Teton Mall in Idaho Falls, Idaho, S ears and Kmart workers still have no idea whether they’ll have a job after the holidays, as the once-mighty retailer slogs through bankruptcy. But the federal bankruptcy court working through the case has nonetheless delivered a Christmas miracle for one important constituency: the company’s executives. Late on Friday, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Robert Drain approved $25 million in year-end bonuses for Sears’ top managers, as the company had requested. Nineteen executives would get about one-third of that money, around $8.4 million, if Sears hits certain financial targets in the next six months, or even if it merely pronounces itself on track to reach those goals. Another $16.9 million would be distributed to 315 senior employees in “retention bonuses,” so they don’t leave to join other retailers. That comes to less than one-half of one...